Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes(2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.Item To Dictate the Peace: Power, Strategy, and Success in Military Occupations(2014) Marcum, Anthony Scott; Huth, Paul K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation addresses the following question: why do some states win a war only to lose the occupation whereas other states can successfully impose their preferred outcome via the control of foreign territory? For example, compare the United States' failure in Iraq (2003-2008) to the Allied Powers' success in France (1815-1818). To explain this variation, I develop and test a principal-agent model in which I incorporate the occupied elite's costs of compliance and the occupier's strategies of control. As agents, the occupied elites expect to incur significant domestic and international costs if they consent to the occupier's demands, and thus have strong incentives to not comply. The occupying state can overcome this hostility through a costly exercise of power to shape the choices and manipulate the incentives of elites to influence their decision-making. Occupying states that engage in dictating as a strategy of control are compelling the elites to make a costly choice. By constraining the choice set to compliance or non-compliance with its terms, the occupying power can effectively separate strongly adverse elites from moderately or weakly adverse ones, and thereby gain a commitment to its objectives. Although previous work on occupations recognizes the difficulties in achieving success, the costs of compliance to the elite and the occupiers' strategy of control are largely overlooked in previous scholarship. To evaluate the theoretical argument, I employ two research methods in the project. First, I built an original dataset to test the effects of the costs of compliance and the strategies of control on the outcomes of 137 military occupations that result from interstate wars between 1815 and 2003. The statistical analyses are paired with two plausibility probes: the Chilean Occupation of Peru (1881-1883) and the Soviet Occupation of North Korea (1945-1948). Second, I examine in-depth the American Occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. The case study investigates how the costs of compliance - across regime change, economic stabilization, and rearmament - generated resistance among Japanese politicians, and how the Americans exercised their power to dictate that the former comply with the latter's costly terms during the course of the occupation.Item Foreign Policy Decision-Making and Violent Non-State Actors(2004-11-23) Andersen, David R.; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A state's foreign policy is directed toward a variety of external actors. Most understanding of foreign policy behavior, however, is derived from observations of states interacting with other states. This study examines how foreign policy decision-making during crisis differs when it is directed toward violent non-state actors. A crisis is defined as an event in which a state perceives a threat to one or more of its basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response, and a heightened probability of engaging in military hostilities. Violent non-state actors are those non-state groups that pursue their political goals through the use of or threat to use violence. Additionally, the non-state actors of interest are those that threaten an external state's national interests in such a way that it represents a crisis for that country, necessitating some form of foreign policy response. This study argues that because non-state actors lack many of the structural characteristics associated with a state, such as a recognized foreign ministry or the lack of trust states have in a non-state leader's ability to enforce agreements, states respond to these crises more violently than they do when responding to crises triggered by states. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data confirms that the major response by states toward crises triggered by violent non-state actors are more violent than responses to crises triggered by states. Empirical results also show that non-state groups with more pronounced political and military structures are less likely to be responded to violently. Other factors, such as the nature of the value threatened and type of violence used to trigger the crisis, do not have a significant impact on how states respond. This study argues that a set of international norms have emerged that help mitigate the level of violence between states and that these norms do not apply as strongly to these violent non-state groups. However, non-state groups that are able to establish institutional structures similar to those of states are more likely to lessen the level of violence directed toward them.